GoodReads meta-data is 206 pages, rated 4.0 by 113 litizens,
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Most welcome!
On Wall Street in the early 1970s investment banker John Putnam Thatcher reluctantly is drawn into a fight over the appointment of a new partner in a client firm. In that family firm one partner has died and the workload is piling up until a new one can be found. Nothing new in that.
But in this case the head of the firm is an irascible game player in his 80s who cares not a whit for convention and has no heirs to drop anchor on him. His final beau geste is to appoint a black man to the firm and nominate him for a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. While the Board of Governors of the Exchange can be relied up to be colour blind in considering the nomination, not so the clients of the firm or other members of the exchange. The black candidate is a well-qualified and immensely successful banker himself.
But the southern clients react and the southerners in the firms go off the rails at the idea of working for ‘one of them,’ as an analyst says while slamming doors. The racism is visceral and pronounced. There is one grotesque scene at a gala at the Lincoln Center when a racists stock broker of some wealth berates one and all, but most of all the hapless Thatcher for treating with ‘one of them,’ though this apostle of purity does not use such an oblique term. The racist then descends into an incomprehensible rant that today can only bring to mind President Tiny.
Amid all this conflict another of the partners of the firm is poisoned and dies. While a sniper per the cover art takes a shot at the black nominee. Thatcher starts putting two and two together.
Needless to say the obvious candidates are too stupid, impetuous, incompetent to murder anyone but the language, civility, and reason. As is to be expected, the least likely one did it!
This is part of a long running series, many of which I read in paperback years ago, perhaps even this one, though the mists of time have closed over it. This time I had on Kindle. The setting is evoked but not with crushing pedantry, the characters are many and differentiated, there is mystery rather than gore, and the dialogue is acerbic and droll. While the police are never central, they are portrayed as competent, focussed, and determined, not figures of ridicule to make Thatcher look better. He has no need of straw men to look good. Miss Corso, Thatcher’s office retainer, is a marvel of indifference to everything but her duties and in this single-minded application she invariably makes Thatcher feel he does not live up to her standard. Enuf said.
Emma Lathen is a partnership of two Harvard graduates in business, Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart. They wrote twenty-four Thatcher novels and another seven set in Congress with another protagonist. The first appeared in 1961 but it was only in 1977 that their names became known. The secret had been successfully kept secret for fifteen years.
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